Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

by Lindy West

(The fact that ANY kid wants to be a veterinarian is bananas, by the way—whoever does veterinary medicine’s PR among preschool-aged children should be working in the fucking White House.)

If an alien came to earth—a gaseous orb or a polyamorous cat person or whatever—it wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference between me and Angelina Jolie, let alone rank us by hotness.

A realistic ad campaign for adulthood would never sell: Do you like candy for dinner? And plantar fasciitis?

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all—in my mother’s professional opinion—phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.

There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.

what if this was all a magic trick, and I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true? Why, instead, had I left that decision in the hands of strangers who hated me? Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet. What if you could opt out of the game altogether?

I’m miles behind you, my breathing ragged. But you didn’t carry this up the mountain. You only carried yourself. How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me? You couldn’t. But I can.

(Do you know what is actually not a good way to help a group of people, it turns out? Advocating for their eradication.)

and had decorated his apartment entirely in zebra-themed bric-a-brac—due, no doubt, to some passing, impetuous whim. (“Hey, zebras are trick!”) By the time I was born, a few years later, they were financially stable, he had a day job at an ad agency, and the zebra merch was limited to one vase, two paintings, a set of directors’ chairs, and a life-sized F. A. O. Schwarz stuffed zebra named Simon. You know, a reasonable amount.

The rich aren’t paying for luxury—they’re paying for basic humanity.

Regarding airline travel

More broadly, in a nation where puritanical gasbags have a death grip on our public education system, can we really expect ironclad safe sex practices in people from whom comprehensive sex ed has been withheld? Blaming and shaming people for their own illnesses has always been the realm of moralists and hypocrites, of the anti-sex status quo.

We don’t question the notion that The Daily Show had a profound effect on American politics, or that Ellen opened Middle America’s hearts to dancing lesbians, or that propaganda works and satire is potent and Shakespeare’s fools spoke truth to power. So why would we pretend, out of sheer convenience, that stand-up exists in a vacuum?

Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find? The short answer, I’d discover, is “nah shut up bitch lol get raped.”

it seems less like a universal accord and more like a booby trap that powerful men set up to protect their “right” to squeeze cheap laughs out of life-ruining horrors—sometimes including literal torture—that they will never experience.

Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism.

Dave was convinced that Aham was going to attack him over his “fall down the stairs” comment. “I’m a big boy,” he wrote (sic throughout), “and I can fight my own battles and take any punches thrown at me but Ill be honest until we squared that away I thought for sure I was going to get in a street fight with that guy. I worked out for two hours just visualizing the fight before the Underground that night, I had a switchblade on me, a 9mm in my trunk and I was ready for anything.” Dave brought a knife and a gun to a comedy show. Because of a disagreement about whether or not comedy clubs are safe for women. Because the way people talk onstage has no bearing on how they behave in real life. It’s so pathetic, the tough-guy posturing, but so sinister, because, to put it plainly, that’s how black men die. Insecure, pee-pants white men assume that any disagreement is a life-threatening situation. Dave assumed Aham was dangerous, and was prepared to shoot him with a gun, even though Dave was the only one in the equation who’d issued a threat of any kind.

The tide of public opinion has always turned, invariably, on coolness. People just want to be cool.

There’s no “winning” when it comes to dealing with Internet trolls. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want?

Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place. If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.